The ABCD System of Melanoma Detection A Spectrophotometric Analysis of the Asymmetry, Border, Color, and Dimension

represent a commonly used clinical guide for the diagnosis of early melanoma. The authors revised these criteria in the light of objective measurements of the features of pigmented skin lesions obtained by telespectrophotometric analysis (TS) in the visible and near-infrared wavelengths. METHODS. This study involves a consecutive series of 186 patients with 195 cuta-neous pigmented lesions (53 melanomas and 142 nonmelanoma lesions). Each lesion was subjected to TS in vivo, before surgery. For this purpose, the authors used four spectrophotometric parameters that could be closely related to the four criteria of the ABCD guide, namely, roundness (an estimate of how a lesion contour resembles a circle), smoothness (an indicator of the regularity of a lesion border), mean reflectance (the ability of a lesion to diffuse or reflect the incident light), and size (the greatest dimension of a lesion). RESULTS. When melanomas and nonmelanoma lesions were compared by univar-iate analysis, all four spectrophotometric parameters considered proved to be significantly different (P 5 0.05). Multivariate logistic analysis showed that mea